SureAI

I was going through my screenshots, and wanted to share something I skipped over last time:



I am something of a connoisseur of Endralean insults by now, and I can say that slam was excellent. 9/10, Dal’Geyss.


- Anyway. The Angel quest has me meeting Calia in Frostcliff Tavern, on the edge of the Great White North.
When I get there, I find her already questioning two of the locals about that Dal’Guldar guy. Good hustle, Calia!



I wish this happened more often, honestly; showing up to find the quest already in progress. Jespar could learn a thing or two.

- You can just move on with the quest, but you can also ask around about Dal’Guldar for a bit of extra XP. One customer is convinced he’s going to lead a horde of undead rabbit monsters to take over Enderal. One fellow tells a story showing that to a civilian, summoning some ghost-animal is probably pretty damn spooky. The way he tells the story sounds like people have made fun of him for it so much he’s half convinced it didn’t happen.
Yeah. Summoning ghost animals. What a silly bugger. As if that could ever happen, right guys?

- Due to the bug I spent a lot of time wandering around the tavern talking to people and looking for anything I missed,which involved listening to the minstrel girl play my new favorite Enderalean bard song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw7PWr8znuE) as well as a couple others. The NPC named ‘Minstrel’, meanwhile, was in the back, stirring a stew pot on the hearth. What is that guy’s deal?

- Calia, little ray of sunshine that she is, also has this to say about the war with Nehrim: “They trump us in every aspect - manpower, equipment, siege machinery… Let’s just hope the walls of Ark are as durable as they’re said to be.”
Ark, of course, is the capital of Enderal. She’s freely assuming that the enemy will be knocking on the Order’s gates shortly.
This is pretty effective story-telling, here: Calia is kind of a downer by nature, but the Nehrimese landed like, a week ago, game-time. When even your party members are expecting your side to roll over in that short a time…
What we’re doing right now has nothing to do with resisting the Nehrimese invasion. We’re hunting down macguffins to fight the High Ones when we’re expecting a wave of purely mortal steel to punch our gates in.
Whatever! It’ll be fiiiine.

- The path to Dal’Guldar’s fortress is about as far from Frostcliff Tavern as Fogville, that place with all the Arps, but in the exact opposite direction. Along the way almost immediately we’re attacked by half a dozen Nehrimese soldiers and a guard dog, but honestly I was fighting guys with the silver swords the Nehrimese are using 10 levels ago.
It’s a shame there’s only one of me and like five entrances into Ark, I could kill guys like this all day.

- Calia warns me to be careful of a guard tower along the way, but frankly it’s right next to the path so I aggro it anyway. Sure, I might have been able to sneak past if I’d stuck to the mountainside and engaged the sneak skill, but after rolling those Nehrimese earlier I’m feeling like maybe I’m actually a big deal after all, and swagger down the path like I own the place.
With Calia tagging along, even 3 wild mages isn’t too much of threat. Possibly this is due to one of the mages slipping and falling off the mountain, admittedly.
There are a few kegs of black powder to pick up here, presumably that’s going to be useful at some point? Since I’ve never seen anything like them, I’m assuming ‘quest item’.

- More of a problem are a trio of Lost Ones hanging out over a few extremely and thoroughly murdered Keepers on the road.
Lost Ones are some of the highest tiers of undead I’ve run across except for those Lord of the Lost assholes; a lot of them are naked, but with sweet glowing eyes.
Calia is distraught, and suggests we should search the group for clues. I, of course, am way ahead of her and already wearing the Keeper’s baller red cloak.
He did have a written order with him, telling him to go hunt down a local entropist, so we take a brief break to do that. The mine the entropist is hiding in is like 10 steps away, so it’s convenient.

- The mine is pretty sweet-looking.



Not exactly homey, but it has a certain ambiance.

- Elemental wolf bites still hurt a bunch, but they’re relatively fragile and never having to fight more than two at a time keeps things manageable.
I learn that the dead Keeper (whose name I have already forgotten) helped Calia during her trial. I like to think that I’m honoring him in my own way; his cloak is going to keep me warm and noble-looking in the cold winter nights ahead, and his boots will finance the Order (I am part of the Order, this fact checks out).

- After dispensing justice at the point of a blade to the no-good Entropist, we come upon an abandoned village covered in fire elementals and elemental wolves. Not entirely sure why. Are they guards? Is something calling them here? The way they’re spaced, in ones and twos along the roads of the village, it kind of feels like I stumbled into the Village of the Fire Fairies or something.
Calia informs me that someone has been here recently. Hunters? the Prophetess asks.
No, me. I don’t think it’s hunters. Unless local hunters know how to tame fire elementals? I don’t know, the bloody things always attack me on sight, but then, so do wolves and bears (there are also wolves and bears).

- Just as a side note, wandering off the beaten path a bit after the ice bear leads me to a lonely tower. Abandoned, empty, left open to the elements. At the very top… a book on a pedestal called something like The Life of Whisperwind, Volume 4. If the book is to be believed, this is where the noted murderer and drug (sorry, ‘drogae’) addict ended up. He joined an ascetic holy order and returned to the right Path. Right here, presumably.
I thought it was neat, anyway. I should probably read more of Enderal’s books (besides ‘King Lewd and His Maidservant Devotia’ and ‘Lyrical Gushes And Other Fluids, By Prince Adreyu of Mith’, of course, of which I own at least three copies each).

- At the top of the mountain sits the fortress we came here to find.



Next time, I’ll actually enter the place. He’ll probably be a nice man who will have us in for tea, and we can talk about Calia’s curse over biscuits. Or we’ll have to fight a bunch of elementals or undead or something.
One of those.


The Takeaway:
Getting to head around the tavern and talk to all the superstitious peasants about the weird things they’ve heard or seen Dal’Guldar doing was neat, if somewhat buggy. It kind of had the feel of Van Helsing asking about after that mysterious Count in the foreboding castle up ahead. Also, the map is now much more… papery. It’s nice.

What an amazing writeup, thanks again for doing this!

I would love for you, at the appropriate time, take the immense detour that is the Great White North. Where you went left to go up the hill to the castle, go straight and the start to climb the mountain at Old Northwindwatch. I would love to see your experiences on dealing with things on top of the mountain and particularly, the challenging Fortress Rockwatch. Just putting out an idea, when I did only the main quest on my first playthrough, I had no idea what was in the Great White North.

Looking forward to seeing you complete the three Black Stones quests.

Noted!

I did get the feeling that there was a lot of Stuff to do in the northeast corner of the map that I was skipping past to get to main quest content. I'll have to remember to come back here next time the main quest goes on break. I think I cleared up the last of my quest log when I finished bouncing arrows off Pathira's giant golden head.

- So the first thing we discover is a locked door. After a quick conference, Calia suggests we blow it up. You know, like you do.
I point out that I conveniently have two barrels of blackpowder on my person from that tower earlier, and Calia makes a hammer-space joke about impossibly-big pockets! I’m so proud.
Nonetheless, we need more, so we go find some in the prospector town down below. It is a small, very dark hole with almost as many giant spiders as blackpowder barrels. I’m not even surprised. Just disappointed. And a little poisoned.
There's a few exciting minutes of stabbing in the dark before all is quiet again and I can spare the time to put up a mage-light.
I’m honestly not sure if the Frost Spider Queen was already dead (she seems to be looking down the business end of a frost-covered cannon) or if all the wild swinging in the dark did the trick.

- Unfortunately it’s not all fun, games and blowing up front doors: Calia has a brief… episode almost immediately.



It’s kind of cute that she’s giving herself a little pep-talk, but since that pep-talk may be the only thing keeping my insides un-eviscerated… you do whatever you feel like you need to, Calia. Do you want a nice back rub? Maybe a soothing tea?
Actually, if the option existed to say ‘Hey, maybe take a load off? Wait down at the tavern? Have a pint on me?’ I'd go for it. There is no such option, of course.
I figure the pain she’ll be saving me blocking draugr sword stabbin’s will be balanced out by her almost inevitable demon-transformation-slash-betrayal.
Should I be happy that SureAI is setting that up ahead of time with foreshadowing, or kind of annoyed I can’t tell her to shoo and avoid another cutscene defeat? I’m undecided.

- I suspect Dal’Galar may not want visitors.



Call it a hunch.
There’s a brief side-trip looking for a way in past the courtyard, which involves me getting vision-y again. Galar learns from a disciple that the Apothecarius have stopped supplies, like a bartender cutting off a guy who's had a few too many. Except with fresh cadavers, not beer.
Calia, who is REALLY on the ball this quest, wonders why you'd be getting visions of Dal’Galar if they're supposed to be visions of ancient Pyrean times.
This keeps the player from wondering the same thing; if SureAI brought it up, there’s probably a reason the ‘rule’ they introduced earlier is being broken...

- Then a blue flame appearing before the corpses scattered everywhere get back up and draw swords. Behold Dal’Galar’s precious panacea The Angel, long gone out of control. Or so I suspect.
Calia has this theory that it's my visions causing them to get back up, which… okay, accidental necromancy isn't OUTSIDE the boundaries of my weird ass powers, probably. But it's not me! Probably.

- It’s not exactly new, but the main hall and the smithy I find myself wandering through are nicely atmospheric.




You can do a lot with icicles and pale blue mist.
It’s also pretty neat how Dal’Galar has these bright blue-white lights hanging here and there, and one fell down onto a snowdrift in front of the tower stairs I need to take. Good level design. Understated, but does a good job drawing the player’s eye to where they need to go next.
The main hall is big and echoing, with pillars and lion statues and so on, and I can use the navigational help.

- There’s also this lovely lady. Fingers set in quiet ritual repose like a Boddhisatva or a Buddha, shawl gathered about her, very noble and mysterious. Good pose.



I’ve had some bad experiences with statues though, so I unload a few arrows into her (for Constantine) before moving on.
Also, note Calia sounding very inconvenienced by a locked door while we break into this guy's house. I'll turn her into a proper Elder Scrolls protagonist yet!

- I need to find two likely passwords to progress, and Calia suggests we check out the two towers off the main hall. The one on the left tells me, courtesy of another vision, that Dal’Galar’s most precious thing is above, and he commissioned a starling to build a magic doorstop. Then poisoned him during the toast. Two can keep a secret only when one is dead, etc.
Galar apologizes and promises to take care of the starling's family, but I'm not buying any of the Greater Good shit that Galar’s phantom is shoveling.
Calia is pretty bummed that her hero is kind of a douchebag. I knew this was never going to end any other way though, not with the way the blackstones have been built up as being so Elder Scrollsian.

- So up in the tower, Calia gives me a pouch of blackpowder, 5 fire arrows, and the telekinesis spell, and it's time for a physics puzzle.
I mean, I get it. There have been a lot of vision cutscenes already, and there will be more, and game design theory says not to leave the player out of the action for too long.
But why can't Calia do this for me? Seriously. I'll wait over here. Take your time.
No dice. So there I am spending a handful of minutes throwing a blackpowder barrel at the hole...
Before I realize a ‘blackpowder barrel’ and a ‘pouch of blackpowder’ are two different items in my inventory. The explosive barrel I’ve been bouncing off the hole in the wall for 5 minutes is too big to fit. Whoops.
So I manage to huck the pouch in there after a while. Now out comes the bow, and my task is to shoot a fire arrow in there to set it off.
Well, after only having to pick my missed flaming arrows up off the ground once, I do eventually get one in there, things explode, and I’m allowed to progress.

- Right into a kid’s room. I don’t need the attendant vision of Galar reading a story to the child on the bed and promising that soon she’ll be warm again and able to go out into the world and so on to figure out the story beats from here on out. It’s a nice scene; Galar has so far seemed a little cold with his posh accent and erudite demeanor, but this is humanizing. Buuut...
SureAI is mmmmaybe hitting the ‘turn to necromancy to save a loved one’ beat a little hard. This is the third time now! First with Yero, then with the Aged Man, and now Dal’Galar. The scary lengths people will go to for love seems to be one of the biggest themes of Enderal: Shards of Order (whenever it’s not ‘people are dicks’ or ‘nature hates you’).
The child on the bed is a corpse, you see. He’s been keeping her body fresh with some mixture Kileans use to keep their dead undegraded before sea burial. Because of course Dal’Galar didn’t do all this just to save people; he did it to save a person. He has a personal stake in this race!
No matter; we have the first password, ‘Maya.’

- The other tower is his laboratory.
Well, first is a bunch of corpses gathered around a dining hall, and I’m firmly expecting to have to fight all these undead party-goers (we’ve been having to fight ‘reawakening servants’ here and there all throughout) when instead we’re attacked by a Wisp on steroids. As long as a man is tall, shaped vaguely like a floating skeletal serpent, trailing ethereal green flames. Totally rad, honestly. I wish I’d gotten a screenshot of it, but it was kind of a pussy and Calia and my ice elemental piled onto it fast.
More visions, more undead. This is Galar’s lab, complete with entirely too many man-sized cages, a skeleton spread out atop the table, and a weirdly excessive number of hammers arranged on tables according to size. Also these things:



A serene-faced woman, hands clasped in prayer, with snakes on her shoulders. I’m not sure what this is supposed to evoke, exactly. The serpent-goddesses of Crete and India? The caduceus? The serpent heads bear a more than passing resemblance to the prow heads on the viking longboats full of undead that occupy many of Enderal’s scenic beaches...

- The vision has Galar asking his disciple to pack her bags. She was trying to get him to change course, citing that he’s not even healing people any more. He’s spending all his time ‘with this… with this girl.’
So Galar asks her to pack her shit. Not shouting, he’s grateful for everything she’s done… but it’s time for her to go. She sounds shocked, the kind of shock that’ll probably transition to heartbreak the second those doors with the crucified corpses close behind her.
Does Galar see the end coming, and trying to spare her? Or is there no thought in his head for anyone except ‘the girl’?



Galar’s back looks… tired.

- I’m starting to suspect Maya isn’t Galar’s child at all, not biologically. Something in the way the disciple talks about the girl, it’s almost like they found her in the snow. And everything Calia has ever heard of Galar, it’s like he could never find time for women when there was The Work.
Could she be a pyrean like our friend frozen in the ice? Could she be a creation of the black stone?
The mystery is heating up.

- More books. Endless books. Shelves upon shelves. A huge library.
Then on the next floor, a taxidermist’s dream house. Snow bears and Lost Ones and trolls all stuffed and preserved. Classy.
And at the tippy top of the tower, corpses preserved in fluid. Like in the Aged Man’s house. With little bars on the caskets, in case of sudden reanimation into draugr!
Say what you will about Dal’Galar, the man knows his lab safety procedures.



The watery coffins are set up in a ring around a dark, dull stone. If it’s a soul stone, it’s an absolutely massive one. The vision helpfully shows Galar taking energy from the rock and throwing it into the bodies, hoping that the formula is Death + Life energy = Life.
“Energy is life, and energy is death. A trifle less. Not much less, only a little,” Galar hypothesizes. So he just needs a little energy to kick the state over from being death to being alive, I guess, like adding a charge to a dead car battery?
Doesn’t work, of course.

- We do learn that Maya actually is his daughter, go figure. And more importantly, that Taniysha is the name of his wife. We find a letter that shows she… has no idea their daughter is dead. Galar spirited her away to the north under the pretense of ‘curing her disease.’ He says the cool air is good for her, and her cheeks are getting rosier…
Rough.

This feels like it’s getting long, so I’ll break this off here for now, and finish up the quest next update.


The Takeaway:
This quest had kind of a slow start (and a few typos and bugs), but it’s finally kicking into high gear now. Galar’s phantom is hemorrhaging money and support, sending his most loyal follower away, and starting to sound a little unhinged. ‘This must work! It will work!’, that kind of thing.
Before you know it it’ll be all ‘THE FOOLS!’ and ‘They laughed at the academy!’ and then come the legions of bunny Lost Ones to sweep o’er the living like it’s Night of the Lepus

Oh man, this is getting good. Love the way you write and build up suspense. And then you leave us with a cliffhanger!?!?!

Really, really loving this. Thanks!

Just a comment on this:
You will find out more ahead, but the whole theme in Enderal, with the Red Madness as well as all this undeath, is about making that which is death (or not-life) appear to be life and revealing what seems life as something actually dead. (I had to retype this into a sort of riddle, sorry, to avoid spoilers)

Note that Dal'Galar's "girl", which he is holding on to, is called Maya.

Well, I wouldn't want to leave you guys on a cliffhanger! (Also I just really needed to get through this quest)


- Now that I know both passwords, the only thing left to do is to head into the central tower. Right away, I’m face to face once again with Enderal’s strong statue game.



Not sure what this guy is either. Some kind of half-human horned shaman and his mastiff dog companion? Great pose and manly pecs, whatever he is.

- It’s hard to focus on the statue or the rest of the room though, because I can see red dots denoting enemies moving about. Near as I can tell, the open grate in the ceiling lets all the monsters on the second floor see me and come a-running, including a giant Grotesque Lost One.
It’s hard to feel threatened by the Reawakened Servants I’ve been fighting. Not sure why.
They hurt quite a bit, but then they also die in 2-3 swings of my own weapons, so I end each fight with low health but then I just eat all their souls and heal back up.
Possibly it’s just that they don’t look like much, just bog-standard Lost Ones in leather armor with steel swords?

Well, before I head up, I investigate the rest of the room. It’s another library, filled to the brim with treatises on magic, psionics, history, geography, and… aha!



It gets pretty lonely up here after you killed all the servants and drove away the disciples, doesn’t it, Dal’Galar?

- The second floor looks like a big open arena type area that would probably be pretty exciting to fight a giant undead monster in. Oh well. It’s about that time when I’m wondering what Calia meant when she said people had been through that prospector town, when the portcullis comes down trapping me on one side and Calia and my ice elemental on the other.



Well, it’s not… exactly… a cutscene defeat?
Seriously, though. Where the heck were these guys hiding in the fire elemental-and-spider-infested ruin of the town? How long were they waiting for us?

- This brightly colored but surprisingly well-dressed gentleman is apparently employed by the same guys who attacked Lishari in that old ruin whose name I don’t remember. He has nothing good to say about the idiots who set fire to the ruin they were inside, and for a moment our minds are in sync on how terrible those guys were.
The merc is apparently being paid like a king to take us out. Since I doubt the High Ones employ a lot of Kilean mercenaries, I’m going to go ahead and assume Coarek is behind this, but I’m willing to be surprised. Maybe it’s the Truchessa, trying to smash the magic macguffin so Tealor Arantheal will stop messing around with the Beacon? Who knows.
He’s about two lines into his supervillain monologue when Calia tries to stick a greatsword through his face (God bless you, girl) and we learn he’s a master of Mentalism.
I’m wishing I’d found the psionic spell to block attacks and telekinetically dangle my enemies in midair, I tell you what. All I could find were books on Panic I through IV.
This does explain why my loyal elemental is just standing there like a lump, though! Psychic mind whammy! Or bad pathing, but I like that first thing more.

- Calia says stuff like, ‘Run! Find the Angel!’ and, well, she’s the one with cutscene powers, so I comply.
But just for posterity’s sake, allow me to share some of the things the Prophetess hears as she tries to work her way around back to that room, which I have dubbed the Uncomfortable Offscreen Rape Montage:



So, we’re all adults here, right? I think we can all agree this is absolutely a gang rape about to happen.
The game even gives a countdown. 35 seconds, here’s some re-awakening servants in your way, go! There’s a locked door that none of the roughly 50 keys I have on my person (each servant dropped two) works on, so I turn to the right… right around when Calia has been reduced to pleading with them to get away because we all know what happens when Calia gets wound-up, I smash right through the floor and things get kind of blurry for a minute.
I appreciate Calia’s voice work here, but I even more appreciate it when the screams and snarls begin.
As any Left For Dead survivor will tell you, Don’t Startle the Witch.

- Once I get back to the room, I have to think in amazement, “Is that thing getting worse??”



I mean, the chunks of former people, sure, that’s pretty standard for Calia on a tear… but why is everything on fire?
Calia is out cold on the floor in the midst of all that. And cold. And possibly dead.

- I have the option to make her a bed and a fire (‘but where am I going to find fire?’ I laugh to myself) instead of leaving her lying there, and that’s kind of cute, so I do that.
Then, well. I’m a girl on a mission now, aren’t I? Find the Angel, scare up some life energy, pop it back into Calia, bob’s your uncle.

- Well, there’s a couple more fights and visions to work through, first.
The next batch has Galar going on about how, tomorrow, she’ll be all right again! Also, apparently, he expects her resurrection to come with a free batch of superpowers?
Heal the blind and the lame, uplift mankind, yadda yadda.



I mostly feel my face pull into a weird sneer-grimace watching Maya’s very… action figure pose, there. It wasn’t so obvious in the bed, but here, it’s all too clear that Dal’Galar is talking to a corpse.
Did he pick her up from her bed, I wonder? Did he carry her to this dining hall and set her up in a chair himself? Did he cook all her favorite dishes and set them in front of her?
Or did the servants I just re-killed do it while he looked on fondly?
Eurgh.

- More cool statues, this quest is full of them! Also, the object of the quest – and one last battle, natch. By this point I’ve been conditioned to expect the corpses lying around to get back up in a sheet of blue fire, but also I need to fight one of those serpent anomalies (one that looks more like the normal spooky ghost serpents, not that glowing green lad from the research tower)



And the only time I actually died all quest; my own fault, really, I stopped moving while trying to stab the anomaly long enough for the archers to feather me.

- One more vision to go. Papa Dal’Galar uses the black stone, and Maya… wakes up.
This is Dal’Galar’s voice actor really bringing his A-game, too. When he stutters on ‘M-Maya? Can you… can you hear me?’ you just know that this is all he wants with his whole being, and if it doesn’t work again it’ll crack him like breaking glass.
And of course the game gives us a second for Maya to seem fine before it brings the hammer down.



And I go, “Ohhhhhh.” That’s the shadowy demon thing. Yep.
I don’t really need to watch the Veiled Woman explode the poor cleric/necromancer and call Li’l Calia by her name to figure out how this goes.
Because really, if you wind up with a demon attached to your soul, it just makes a lot more sense for someone to have put it there rather than it grow on its own. Unknowingly, probably, although Galar seems like the kind of Faustian bargainer who would consider that a fair trade.
After all, the only one not in danger from the demon is the little girl it’s attached to.
Pft! And he thought it was going to give her Jesus powers. Man, don’t you know this is Enderal? The continent where dreams go to die.

- It’s all over but the crying, now. I’m a little sad I didn’t get to see the Prophetess juggling the black stone and the Angel over Calia’s rapidly-cooling body trying to figure out how that works, but this is fine too I guess.
You get an option to either tell Calia the truth or snow her. Claim Dal’Galar was killed in a potions accident or whatever.
The comforting lie option is for moms who lose their sons to cults, though, not to a Keeper 4th rank. Why should I be the only one to suffer?
Well, after the smash cut back to Frostcliff Tavern there’s a whole conversation tree we can go through to try and make sense of it all. Calia is not taking it well, which, sure. I get that. She’s no worse off than before as far as I’m concerned, but Calia’s kind of a ‘glass is half empty’ paladin anyway.
I am kind of glad I didn’t try to sell her on the ‘You know, the demon isn’t so bad, you’d be dead now if not for it’ when I get this line:



And I mean, considering how rape-y that whole segment was, and now this line? ... Yeah. I’m with you on Team Demon Bad, Calia. Yikes.
Nice lighting, though.
Also, collarbones.
… What? I’m allowed to notice.


The Takeaway:
And that’s the first quest of three. Woo boy.

… I have so many questions.
What was reanimating the undead, if The Angel is just a tool for transferring energy? Was it really my visions, like Calia said? I am kind of a lich I guess...
Are the visions maybe flooding energy into my surroundings as they seem to stop time for me to have a convenient flashback, causing death energy to kick over into life energy?
What was up with that green-glowing spectral snake?
Why is there a black stone for me to pick up, if Galar stuck it in Calia?

Also, holy shit the Veiled Woman is a High One-tier asshole. Like, she just waited and watched as I got tied to a rock and sunk, and that’s kind of shitty, but par for the course for Mysterious Oracles. But she intentionally put Calia in that village like a bomb, primed and ready to blow. Just to get her into the Order? Have you ever tried the old ‘drop her off on the doorstep with a note’ gambit?
Cold, man.

Great line, excellent post to a riveting quest. I admit that I did not see the twist coming and hit me enough that I wanted to get to know her even more (and I hope you do as well, even if you are playing a female like I had).

Don't be shy, go for it, you would make a great couple

Only a part of the energy was used (quote Galar: "Not too little, not too much"), the stone is just a little diminished.

Oh yeah, I mean Jespar is more fun to hang out with but Calia is good people. And the prospect of my imminent death by shadow-Calia gives our interactions spice!